The Minds of Others

It is what gives work meaning. But, what if I speak an entirely different language from those who are judging my work? I have heard it said that English majors don't read literature anymore. True or not, they certainly don't read the same books I did. Of course, some of this is describable as distinction: no one reads the same "books". I once went through the mental exercise of trying to figure how many of the roughly 50,000 remaining readers of Ancient Greek and Latin in the United States also attended law school and got an MFA. A small number, I bet. And those are probably just three minor irrelevant facts.  The real stuff, the real teachers in our lives, the alcoholic drug-addicted mother, the girl one fell in love with in high school, the death of a close friend, etc, etc., etc., are each different for each of us. So back to books.

It's astounding to me how often on first review of a new poem, I see the echos in it, the allusions, the tone picked up from thousands of poems read in several different languages. One must be wary of pride in this and I was more than a little mean-spirited the other day. I was sitting next to a young woman who has been writing poetry and performing at a local "spoken word" venue. I asked her about where her poetry originated, what inspired her, and she talked about about a group of incarcerated women she met who have evolved a rap-inspired spoken word to help them process the injustice in their lives. This is a beautiful thing. Beautiful in itself and beautiful to be inspired by it. But it also made me feel very alone, like a distant cold satellite in a wobbly orbit around a green and happy planet. When she asked me about my work, I told her that I had been writing poetry since I was in third grade, I listed the languages I had learned all or part of, the teachers with whom I had studied, the aesthetic school with which I had once been associated, the degrees I had collected, the reading I did in art history, philosophy, science, and the poets whom I loved more than others, whose music and depth still was a fount of inspiration. When I was done, I apologized for being an ass.

Of course, I am imagining the supposed audience. Here is what I imagine (some of this is fired by experience, having been co-editor of two literary magazines): a gaggle of bored, sullen, college students, who are texting while leafing through submissions to the magazine on which each is part of the editorial staff. That is the rhythm of their lives. Their literature. Web pages. Sound bites. Synopses and books about books about books. I once had a creative writing graduate student defend his failure to read literature by claiming that it would dilute his originality.  Has the world passed me by? Am I merely a relic?

Perhaps. Does it matter? Probably not. It's not as though I am going to stop writing. It is an affliction I can't seem to shake. The poems just happen. Perhaps the point is not to be published, to be acclaimed, to be compensated. Perhaps the point is the writing of the poem. All of it, all the books, all the experience, all the unconscious, all the conscious all comes down to that: the writing of the last poem.  Until the next one.

March 31

To what purpose, April, do you return tomorrow?

Like a virgin consecrated to God, producing nothing

But joy full of sorrow and the empty rehearsal

The same cruel trick played over and over and then

Smiling with your canine teeth exposed

Advertising like a sometimes distant friend

That winter is surely over until it comes around again

Keith Dunlap

A Lesson From Life?

It's like jazz; sometimes you play the wrong note, but you play it fortissimo, and maybe it's the right note:

Lines Written At the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (John Clare)

What I do is for me, for that I came

In a world full of worry, I am to be defamed

I am mine own sound, but mine sound is not the same

Because a hazel wood fire permeates my brain

I long for scenes where men hath never tread

As my doctor, Fenwick Skrimchire, once said

“After years of poetical prosing,” the present insanity ensued

I live among the ignorant a man hungry for food

Disheveled I wander in the quickening maze

East of me, winter, west of me, winter days

I stumble like a chariot hitched to a crippled blaze

Into the world’s own chaos half-crazed

With constructed meaning, with the simple earth’s delight

I am mine own museum vacant of mine own sight

Keith Dunlap

Post-Post-Post Post (After Andy Warhol)

Andy Warhol happened. High and low collapsed into each other. Beauty and truth were replaced by the image as manipulated by commerce to entice the consumer. All this was showcased by Andy Warhol. The lyric was replaced by the jingle. All pop music, even rock, is merely an advertisement for an image. We are not trying to live with integrity to a moral ideal (something greater than the self) but to an image (a substitute self). So, what to do?

I propose nothing. Seriously. NOTHING. I predict that if one lives, reads, thinks, breathes, writes, revises at this moment in time, one will be influenced by this fact, one's work will account for this fact. Don't chase it. Do not try self-consciously through irony, self-reflexiveness, or some other mannered response, to incorporate it. Aim at truth. Aim at beauty. Your efforts will reflect the zeitgeist. Or they won't. You can't force it. You can't avoid it. Any attempt to be new will result in a mere novelty.

Stop chasing your shadow. It will follow you.

The Speed of Light

The speed of light is much too slow

I cannot let my panic go

Starting to snow a deliberate snow

The speed of light is much too slow

Nothing happens quite as fast

Snow follows stars, follows snow falling fast

The stars imply the distant past

I wouldn’t want this day to last

How time curves back to show

The speed of light is much too slow

But I wouldn’t want it any faster

As long as you were here with me

On this the best of days my last

Keith Dunlap

The Only Cardinal Sin

The only mistake I have ever made--and it is one that I have repeated over and over throughout my life--is not having confidence in what I suspect to be true.  "Not having the courage of one's convictions" is too strong an expression of this failing, however. My suspicions rarely if ever formally solidify into convictions. Instead, my timidity or thoughtfulness or low self esteem (or whatever) prevents me from announcing/publishing my dimly sensed inner thoughts about something. Rather, I more easily adopt the ideas of others about things, because the holders of those contrary opinions are, in my view, more authoritative, more learned, and generally smarter than I. As a result, I suffer from a peculiar brand of intellectual depravity. For example, other than Yeats and Auden, I never cared much for modernist poetry. Yet, when I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the late seventies, modernist poetry was central to what was taught as poetry. So, I pretended to like Pound and Eliot more than I did.  I suppose this is a common enough failing of undergraduates (at least in my day.) Yet isn't it the worst of sins? Better to cling stubbornly and foolishly to a genuinely held even if generally discredited belief. Not trusting one's inner voice leads over and over again into a peculiar brand of disappointment and confusion. It is disappointment tripled: first, one is disappointed in what turns out not to be true; second, one is disappointed in one's elected arbiters elegantiae; and, third, one is disappointed in oneself for having been duped. Attentiveness to one's own opinion leads not only to the dialectical testing of closely held assumptions and perhaps a habit of prudent investigation into those assumptions, but also to a journey of discovery about oneself.  It is better to have loved and lost...

Of course, the above is a gross over-simplification.  Nothing is more tedious or doomed than someone who only listens to his inner voice, who is tone deaf to the criticisms or insights of others. Yet in the crucible of one's innermost thoughts, there is an alchemy.

Things I Don't Like in Poetry

Not a complete list:

A fancy word where a plain, powerful word would do

"Breathy" lines instead of lines informed by stress and letter sounds

Where the poem tells me what to think about the poem, i.e. where the idea of the poem is spelled out in abstract terms in the poem itself so that there's no mystery about what the poem is trying (or not trying) to say

Cliche wrapped in preciousness, any preciousness at all, in fact (often associated with breathiness)

Disingenuous ideas.  Try this experiment: next time you read a poem, stop at each distinct thought, and ask yourself: does anyone really think that way?  You will be amazed.

In fact, a lot of poems I read stand on either cliche wrapped in preciousness (take away the fancy language and what is really being said is nothing but the obvious) or disingenuous (truly unbelievable that anyone would seriously think that)

I am sure that I am guilty of all these things at one time or another.  All the more reason to make a list.

Why I Write

Let's be honest.  Poetry is a hobby to me, an important hobby, but a hobby nonetheless.  It's not putting food on the table and I have no illusions about my stature or talent, except perhaps for the illusion that I have no illusions.  I'm good at it.  I publish and can probably continue to publish.  Beyond that, who knows?  I'm probably not the worst poet in America, and certainly not the best (whatever that means).  I am neither convinced of my own "genius" nor of my own "immortality".

The question then is why I write at all.  Why one writes at all.  I mean, why bother?  If one is not convinced that one is contributing in an essential way to culture or humanity, what is one doing and why is one doing it? I have always written.  I started writing in Third Grade and haven't stopped.  That may be a complete answer, but still an evasion.

It may simply come down to a combination of laziness and stubbornness.  Really.  Writing, I think, is a kind of shortcut to life.  It takes this complex impossible task, living, and reduces it to two-dimensions.  That is, it provides substitute aesthetic satisfactions for the hard-won real satisfactions of life.  I can only speak for myself, but I have no desire to "get ahead" in life.  None.  Writing is a way of getting ahead OF life without getting ahead IN life.  An odd use of one's time, if you ask me.  It is, in many ways, of course, self-contained.  Its rewards, for me, nonetheless, are spiritual, in a very broad sense of that word.  Writing is an exploratory experience which also allows me to confirm my basic ideas about who I am and what's important to me.

Don't get me wrong.  I like clean sheets and hot meals and paid bills.  I have had periods in my life when I didn't have any of those things and I don't romanticize that insecurity.  I'm just saying that, if that is all there is or if getting more of those things than someone else is all there is, I'm not extremely motivated to get out of bed.  I am lazy and unambitious in that way.  I don't care so much.  Perhaps, for this reason, I will never be a "successful" writer.

I like the pretend world better.  The world of music and words and ideas.  The world of synthesizing all those things into something I call a poem.

The stubbornness?  Persisting despite constant discouragement, disappointment and doubt.  Somehow, at an early age, I came to believe that writing is important, and despite the evidence of reality, I won't let go of that ideal.  Pure stubbornness and laziness.

An Amateur at Art

I understand, I think, why my manuscript is not getting any traction with potential publishers, despite the fact that a lot of the poems in it have been published in very good literary magazines.  For those of you who don't know, most books of poems are published through contests, where the entry fee pays for the publication (and perhaps partly for the distribution) of the book.  So, I have been entering my manuscript in contests.  I am fortunate that we have the financial resources to pay the fee and absorb the other costs. The manuscript contains about 65 poems and about 25 of them have been published in journals.  So far, the manuscript has been summarily dismissed, never making it past the first cut, often being returned even before the deadline for submissions has closed.

The explanation for this distaste is outside of my knowledge, of course.  I have no real idea of who is doing the thinking and what he or she is thinking when they take a look at my work and say, "ugh," or "nah".  A possible explanation did occur to me, however, and I think it is worth kicking around a bit.  I start with an analogy.  I have an acquaintance.  We haven't seen each other for years.  She is extremely bright, a Harvard grad, and, more importantly, an extremely skilled painter.  She did not go to art school, but she has spent her life painting.  Her paintings are beautiful and skilled.  They are representational.  She doesn't belong to a school of painting, but, if I had to give her work a name, I would call it post-post-impressionist.  If you just glanced at them, you would think that they are not unlike a lot of work that one might see at a craft fair or local art show.  In fact, her work far surpasses the stuff where one would instinctively place it, but there it is.  That's where she shows. She is not part of the New York or any other art scene. She is an "amateur".  She paints beautiful, careful, representational, post-post-impressionist paintings.  They are just extremely good.

That's the problem.  Now, I don't claim that my work, especially my most recent work, which is what I am really talking about, is on par with this painter's work.  Nonetheless, there is something in the analogy.  My new work has departed, intentionally, from the kind of post-New York School, post-modern, surrealism, that used to be my trade, and has been making attempts to use very plain, subtly tuned, language, in what often appears to be a confessional mode, i.e. based on personal experience, in a narrative style.  Not always, but there's a lot of that.  Certainly, at first glance, someone might revolt from the easy rhythms, the use of internal and end rhyme, the first person singular, and dismiss the work as the work of an amateur.  I do not, as far as I know, belong to a school.  Although, I have an MFA from a good program, it is in fiction, not poetry.  Although I read lots and lots of contemporary work in journals and anthologies, more often than not, I am appalled at the lack of musicality, the pretentiousness, and most importantly, the sophomoric thought that passes for profundity.  I can see why, in contrast with this work, I seem like an amateur.

In my own defense, I want to say just a few words.  One, I am an amateur, I suppose. And gladly.  I am outside academia, which, I think, has given me the freedom to write in a way which does not conform to current expectations or taste.  Two, given that freedom, I have decided not to hide behind my education and reading, but to try to create substantial work that is not meant to impress anyone, but to get done, what I conceive admittedly, is the work of a poem, that is, carry a "thought" that can only be expressed through the fusion of poetic art (music, diction) with imagination (metaphor, rhetoric).  So, what my poems do is meant to look straightforward: I often use form, and I try mightily to let the poem do the work, not me.  In other words, I try not to beat the reader over the head with what I call the argumentum of the poem, try not to beat the reader over the head with my erudition or my cleverness, but make something very hard look very easy.  I don't want to be part of a movement or a school. I want to write poetry.  In fact, I can't help but write poetry.  I think there's a lot more than meets the eye in my poems, but easy dismissal may be the price I pay for the path I have chosen.  If, at first glance, my work looks like the work of an amateur, I understand.